Masking: How long [ New ]

[grayalp1806]

Anyone used the motion activation much yet?

Did you mask out leaves and plants moving in the wind successfully? If so how long a mask did you use?

I've been trying up to 40s, but the wind seems to drop every time I do, so as soon as the wind picks back up I get plants activating the video.

When I dropped sensitivity to 1 it didn't catch an actual motion, so am trying to find the sweetspot, but the wind is definitely against me.

[0dan0]

I would agree that the auto masking doesn't always work with the unpredictability of wind.  Here ara a couple tricks that can help.

1) During the masking time, use your hand to "paint" the regions to ignore. This way you can run at a higher sensitivity for the pixels that aren't full of moving leaves. 

2) For even more complicates scenes you can load a image of the mask.  The geek level of this goes deep.   Let me know if you want to explore creating .PGM mask files.

[dannythedon]

Yeah, how would you create .pgm mask files? I have a bird bath and not only do I get false positives in the trees, but also in the water (which I believe would be less precise to "paint")

[0dan0]

There are many steps.  I will only describe my approach using Windows and my favorite free image tool IrFanView (https://www.irfanview.com/)

1) Mount the camera so it will not move.

2) Shoot a short video in the exact mode you will used for motion capture.

3) Remove the SD Card, without moving the camera.

4) Load the video and screen grab a frame (this frame willl be used to determine the mask.)

5) Load this image in IrFanView (or similar)

6) Trim off any chrome (window borders) so you have only the 16:9 image.

7) Option resize to something smaller, 960x540 or 480x270 -- this is so you have less to paint when creating the mask.

8) Use a paint tool (or IrFanView's inbuild paint tool), crudely paint over the image in white for image areas you want to detect, and black for everything else.  Only motion detected in the white regions will trigger a capture.  

9) Resize the black and white image/mask to 36x20  <- yes the mask is tiny, this is why painting can be crude.

10) Save the image to the SD Card within MISC, called mask.pgm .  PGM is supported imagetype with IrFanView, it is a Portable GrayMap.

11) Re-insert the sd card to the camera, without moving it.

Now your camera is ready.

The motion detection will now always use the mask, so using motion mask motion doesn't do anything.  To restore to normal you will have to delete the mask.pgm file.

Told you this was geeky.

[0dan0]

I updated the https://gopro.github.io/labs/control/motion/ page with this info.